Never Let Your Government Tell You Who Your Enemies Are
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Never let your government tell you who your enemies are.
It’s not the fault of middle eastern people that they live on top of a bunch of oil near crucial trade routes in a region which bridges three continents. And that’s all this has ever been about. Not fighting “terrorism”. Not spreading freedom and democracy. Not even protecting Israel. It’s ultimately about controlling what happens in a geostrategically crucial and resource-rich stretch of land.
The people who live in that part of the world never did you any harm. They pose no threat to you. You’re only being told to hate them because the world’s most powerful people need to dominate west Asia in order to dominate the planet, and they need to inflict immense amounts of violence in order to do so. That’s all this is.
Our rulers use all kinds of narratives from all around the world and across the political spectrum to justify their actions. They’ll use Zionism, Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism or woke identity politics to manufacture consent for their agendas wherever needed. They’ll feed you whatever lines you need to hear in order to dupe you into thinking that disobedient populations in the middle east need military explosives dropped on them. That’s all they care about.
Our rulers use their propagandists in the mainstream news media and their narrative managers in Silicon Valley to manipulate public perception toward these murderous agendas using half-truths, lies by omission, distortions, misleading headlines, reversing the victim and the aggressor, starting the timeline of events at convenient points, and uncritically repeating unproven allegations from untrustworthy sources. These manipulators are as critical to the operation of the imperial war machine as the actual people who drop the bombs.
What kind of groveling, slobbering bootlicker would play along with this? What kind of power-worshipping empire simp would consent to murder and abuse at mass scale against people who pose no threat to them whatsoever, just because the people in charge told them to feel that way? What a pathetic, profoundly undignified way to exist.
They work so hard to manufacture our consent for these atrocities because they absolutely require our consent. So don’t give it to them. When all is said and done our rulers are at all times acutely aware of the fact that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that we could very easily turn around and eat them all if we got it into our heads that that would be a good thing to do. Hold fast to your power, refuse to be taken in by their manipulations, and help wake everyone up to the fact that we are being continuously deceived into compliance, confusion and powerlessness by murderous psychopaths who want to rule the world.
Our real enemies are not in Iran.
Our real enemies are not in Lebanon.
Our real enemies are not in Gaza or the West Bank.
Our real enemies are not in Yemen, Syria, or Iraq.
Our real enemies are in Washington and London and Tel Aviv. In Berlin and Paris and Canberra. In secretive government agencies in the state of Virginia, and in imperial propaganda institutions in New York and Hollywood.
Our real enemies are not the Arabs and the Iranians, they’re the managers of empire who are ruining our world, destroying our biosphere, siphoning our wealth and our resources, threatening us with nuclear brinkmanship, and making sure we stay too poor, sick, busy and brainwashed to figure out what’s going on and take a stand against them.
Don’t let them dupe you into believing otherwise. Fight against their manipulations, and oppose their abuses. We healthy human beings can absolutely win this thing, but even if we don’t, at the very least we can prevent them from stealing our dignity and manipulating us into cheering for their depravity.
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"They work so hard to manufacture our consent for these atrocities because they absolutely require our consent. So don’t give it to them." They have never had my consent. I went to a pro Palestine, pro Lebanon rally today and there were thousands of people there who have not given their consent. Keep talking. Keep telling them they don't have your consent.
I am so sick of my effing country. America’s war against the world is a manifestation of the ugly reality of its internal war against itself. Consider Charlottesville, 7 yrs. ago, an insane turf war initiated by the removal of a bloody statue, but hearkening back to America as apartheid state. Any excuse, any level of historical validity or irrelevance can serve as a trigger for inter-group strife with accompanying violence. Is it any wonder that such a hypocritical society — regardless of all the lovely words in its founding documents— would spill that overflowing violence out into the rest of the cosmos?